Finding a place

[Eaglejarl]

Assume that my character knows a place exists and has a name "the tower of Joe the wizard" and a very approximate location "it's in continental America, east of the Mississippi" but nothing else about it.

Assume that I have an army (several tens of thousands of people) and a bunch of high level wizards and clerics available. What would be the fastest way to find this place? Discern Location seemed promising, but it won't work on a place, or an object from that place that you haven't touched. Scry Location will show you what's there, but won't give you the direction / distance to the place. Circle Dance only works on people

Any thoughts?

[JeminiZero]

Find the Path (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/findThePath.htm) spell?

Teleport (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/teleport.htm) does state that a place counts as carefuly studied if you have scried on it for at least an hour.

Alternatively, if the place happens to be a city, you could cast Locate City [Races of Destiny].

[Eaglejarl]

Find the Path (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/findThePath.htm) spell?

Teleport (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/teleport.htm) does state that a place counts as carefuly studied if you have scried on it for at least an hour.

Alternatively, if the place happens to be a city, you could cast Locate City [Races of Destiny].

Yurgh. Of course, 'Find the Path', I should have thought of that. Thanks JeminiZero.

As an aside: the divination magic available to PCs just ruins lots of different plotlines. I know this has been discussed before, but it would be nice to have a story about how the heroes must "pore through lost tomes and seek out sages expert in esoteric knowledge in order to find the secret location of the Temple of Elemental Awesomeness", instead of waving their hands around for a few seconds while saying "humina humina humina, Find the Path!"

Now the flip side: if I want to protect a large area (say, a New York City block, with a couple of subbasements) from location spells, what would I use? Everything I see is either protection for creatures (e.g. Mind Blank) or too small (e.g. False Vision).

[ace rooster]

Yurgh. Of course, 'Find the Path', I should have thought of that. Thanks JeminiZero.

As an aside: the divination magic available to PCs just ruins lots of different plotlines. I know this has been discussed before, but it would be nice to have a story about how the heroes must "pore through lost tomes and seek out sages expert in esoteric knowledge in order to find the secret location of the Temple of Elemental Awesomeness", instead of waving their hands around for a few seconds while saying "humina humina humina, Find the Path!"

Now the flip side: if I want to protect a large area (say, a New York City block, with a couple of subbasements) from location spells, what would I use? Everything I see is either protection for creatures (e.g. Mind Blank) or too small (e.g. False Vision).

Find the path is great if you know somthing about the place that fits the DM's definition of 'specified destination', which current resident may not. Arcane magic is computer like stupid, so a nickname may not be enough for the spell (Have you ever lost a website? Find the path is like a DNS server, not google). The PCs may still have to pour through tombs of forgotten knowledge simply to find the name of a place.

The other limitation of find the path is that it will simply 404 if the caster cannot physically get there. Casting fly is not a physical action, so a river with only boat crossings will cause it to fail (or at least send the characters on a massive dogleg to avoid the ferry), as will a closed door that the caster cannot break without assistance. Simply being inaccessable is good enough.

Protecting a large area is probably best done by having the whole place underground, accessable only by a tunnel with multiple obstacles that are never open at the same time. Teleportation is stopped by a small army of interior decorators, who are constantly changing what the place looks like. There are several decoy locations undergoing the same treatment by the same decorators constantly that are trapped to comical levels to catch anyone who tries to scry on the decorators or is using an out of date visualisation of the location. It is not foolproof, but it is a start.

[JeminiZero]

Now the flip side: if I want to protect a large area (say, a New York City block, with a couple of subbasements) from location spells, what would I use? Everything I see is either protection for creatures (e.g. Mind Blank) or too small (e.g. False Vision).
The easy way to block scrying from an area is Mages Private Sanctum (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/magesPrivateSanctum.htm).